Monday, May 18, 2009

Every Mistake Imaginable

I first heard EMI called Every Mistake Imaginable back when they issued a live Tristan und Isolde purportedly conducted by Sir. Thomas Beecham. In actuality, the set mixed up performances by Beecham and Fritz Reiner. Sure, Melchior and Flagstad sounded a lot like Melchior and Flagstad, but could no one tell Sabine Kalter and Margarete Klose apart??

In any event, a friend emailed me this morning with a pointer to the newish Lamenti, a recording of a number of 17th c. laments, conducted by Emmanuelle Haim. EMI has track listings with, tantalizingly, little icons indicating that you can listen to the tracks.

Well, no. You have to join some kind of Listening Club to hear the tracks.

I'd settle for short samples. But I'm not joining EMI's Listening Club. Way to get my business, EMI! Welcome to the 21st century, where putting obstacles in people's way doesn't make you friends any more than DRM on CDs does.

4 comments:

What's even worse about that Tristan is that EMI's idea of fixing the problem was to put a sticker on the package to let people know they were getting a Beecham-Reiner hybrid. Surely they could have issued an all-TB version, as Discocorp had already done on LP.